


In the Valley of the Ever Young

by july_19th_club



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, M/M, a little less one-dimensional; a little more rock'n'roll, actually he's not THAT rock'n'roll. he's into poetry, but the fic ends BEFORE he dies!, does this dude even have a last name? unbelivable, if you like a tragedy and a historical romance this is the fic for you, in that there is a character At All i mean really i'm working from the ground up on this guy, we gotta do everything ourselves in this goddamn house, where is he from? what does he like? why is he doing this? find out below
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 03:27:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18217580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/july_19th_club/pseuds/july_19th_club
Summary: a man meets a medium in a war zone.





	In the Valley of the Ever Young

**Author's Note:**

> I don't usually think of myself as being a romance writer, but if I can brag a little here, I think I nailed this one. It's a risk putting up first-person fic, but I write a lot of first-person original fiction as well, and trust me: I am very good at first person. As far as war fiction goes, I'm not really a fan unless it's about people more than battles, and this one's a particularly rough sell, being the most unpopular war in American history, and for good reason. I hope that I've struck a good line between romance fic and being realistic.

How it began or how it ended?

He appeared in the night, and he was both. Klaus will tell you that he was following me all the way into the front and further, but for me it was the other way around. There he was, and there was nothing to do but see where he would go next, and be there.

It’s hard to tell, sometimes, who’s leading, or if anyone is.

My grandmother was the one who told us about the púca when we were kids. When we were real little, she would pour some milk into a bowl and set a few of her homemade honey cookies out. We’d carry it all carefully to the back door and leave it somewhere safe on the porch. Then we’d take the cat in for the night, just to make sure he wouldn’t eat it instead. Sometimes the dishes would be untouched in the morning, sometimes not. I grew up believing that the imps took the offerings, at least until I was about ten and the twins decided we were too old for that sort of stuff.

I remember sitting up when he appeared and seeing, just past his shadow in the gloom, a can of condensed milk, unfinished, that I’d forgot to take care of. Beside it, a single, dry graham cracker. Poor substitutes. Out in the dark, the noise of the frogs in the valley was both distant and deafening, punctuated by faraway firing. The billion small explosions that inch by inch and crater by crater ate up the earth around us. And there he was. He blinked, stared at me with his head cocked to one side like he was trying to work out what had just happened, and in that first long moment I thought I’d summoned him.

**+++**

_Soul of my soul of the soul of a hundred universes_. I hadn’t picked the verse earlier, but I used it that night; for no reason I could think of it had popped into my head while we were moving out, all in a rush, the noises growing from all corners into one overwhelming roar. It was how I got through it, that night, every night - I picked something I’d remember, usually a line from a poem or a verse from a song, and then I said it (or sang it) to myself, over and over, while we formed up or dug in or started shooting or marched back home. _Soul of my soul of the soul of a hundred universes_. That was from Rumi, one of his long poems. _Soul of my soul of..._ and while I held the words in the back of my mind, I kept one eye on the new guy, which was a good thing since he nearly died about six times just on the way out to the field.

I hadn’t figured out _what_ was happening yet when there was a familiar scream from overhead, and next to me on the floor, an unfamiliar one, as the guy jumped and clapped both hands to his head like he’d personally been hit. I was already on my feet; we all were, and he was still cussing and scrambling around when somebody noticed he wasn’t even wearing pants and lit into him for not being ready to move out. From somewhere he got a helmet, had a gun pressed into his hands, and I could feel him stumbling after me as we left the tent at speed. He was still struggling to get his boots properly tied as we dropped down on the ground and settled into our position. He hadn’t loaded, so I swapped with him - _of the soul of a hundred_ \- because even if I was without a working gun for a few minutes I could tell I’d get myself together faster than he would. He lay there looking dumbfounded, eyes huge even in the darkness, and didn’t actually do anything until he saw me get get myself sighted in. I could feel him copying me, hear his breathing, the clink and clatter of shells and the down-the-line scream-shouting of orders flying along. _Universes. Universes. Universes_. It didn’t erase the sounds, it didn’t always make me calmer, but it was the focus that mattered. It was reminding yourself that _something_ other than this existed, even if it was just a brittle few words that nobody else could hear.

At one point there was a lull in the action. I ducked my head down and squeezed my eyes shut, and felt something against my arm. Turned to find him doing the same, looking almost like he was praying. “You good?” I asked.

He made a noise that might have been a brief, hysterical, giggle. “Am I _good?_ ”

“Find something...” He wasn’t listening. I hit him with my elbow. “Look. Find something to repeat. Doesn’t matter what. And just...keep that in your brain, right? It’s what I do.”

He was still for a moment. “That helps?” he asked eventually, voice real small.

I had to be honest. “Sometimes,” I said.

I saw him whisper something to himself, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him keep it up as the night wore on. Dawn came up a little bit quieter, and we got the word to move back out sometime around noon. Could’ve been worse, really - could’ve been a couple days, maybe a week. But that day we were on our way back to pack up camp before dinnertime, and we were on a bus elsewhere (we didn’t know the exact particulars, but that was nothing new) before sunset came around. I caught up to him a few seats ahead of me and finally got his name. He was quiet for most of the ride, just said thanks when I gave him a packet of crackers from my pocket, but as the sun started going down and guys were falling asleep around us, he turned and touched my arm, briefly.

“Hey, that thing?”

“What thing?” I asked.

“The thing you told me to do.”

“Right.” It was such a private tradition to me that I had already forgotten I’d shared it with him. “Worked for you?”

He shrugged. “More or less.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“You wanna know what I was saying?”

“Oh, no, I don’t need to -” I started, but he put a hand on my arm again and cut me off.

“I said, _‘don’t let me die sober, don’t let me die sober, don’t_ -” He saw the look on my face and started laughing, but it was a real laugh this time, genuine. “Anyway, thanks for looking out for me,” he added.

“Sure,” I said, noting for the first time since I’d met him - first time we’d been able to stop and talk - that he was one of those people who makes real good eye contact, and that his lashes were real long. “Anytime.”

We rode in silence for a bit, and then I remembered what else I had wanted to say to him. “What was that all about last night, anyway? You lose your gear?”

“I...uh...wasn’t about anything,” he said, way too casually for that to be true. “Just got a little...uh, turned around.” He laughed nervously. “You know how it is.”

Around us the hills rolled on in the dusk, half-blasted, half lush. A guy drops into camp in the middle of the wilderness, carrying a locked briefcase and wearing nothing but a trench coat, a bloodstained towel, and a stunned expression. Turned around? What, in the jungle? _You looked like you stumbled out of a fistfight in a sauna_ , I wanted to say. _Forgive me for being curious_. But then again, you could say the same thing, without much exaggeration, about all of us. Just one big tropical bloodbath, really.

He took his helmet off and rested his forehead on the back of the seat in front of us. “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning,” he said indistinctly.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

He winked. Soon enough he fell asleep. Just like that, it was him and me. From then on and until the last one fell. It wasn’t meeting. It was finding.

**+++**

I meant to ask him about it again soon, I really did. It was just that things moved fast there, and without meaning to in weeks I’d half-forgotten that he’d shown up like a sprite in the mist. In the beginning I was pretty sure it would come up on its own, like maybe as soon as he tried to explain to anyone how he’d gotten there. But it turned out he never really...had to. I was the only one who’d paid enough attention to it to actually think it was weird. He was just there, the way we all were, and really, people showed up suddenly all the time. Walking out of the jungle, dropping out of the sky. That was normal. Everything was anymore; you couldn’t turn around without running into things that shouldn’t have been happening but were, right there in front of you. Most of those things were awful travesties and you were involved in the causing of them, but once in a while it would be a miracle.

So he settled in, or tried to, and I told myself I’d ask in a while, and then I didn’t. He kept the clothes he’d been given that first night, and for a while all of his stuff rightfully belonged to half the squad. They had a hell of a time trying to find his paperwork and eventually they just had him go down to the base one day and rewrite all of it. After about a month he got his name on his uniform, but only because a dude in our company offered to do it for him. The guy misspelled it while he was sewing it on and put an “I” where the first “E” was supposed to go like he was going to go and spell the word “grief.” I asked Klaus later why he hadn’t just spelled it out for him to begin with and he told me very seriously that he “straight-up” hadn’t thought the guy wouldn’t know what his name looked like. Ted, who’d overheard this conversation, asked him if he thought he was famous or something and joshed him good about it. I filed it away in the ‘unraveling the mystery of Klaus’ drawer in my mind, which included the way he’d arrived and every weird thing he said but also other pressing questions like ‘men: his thoughts?’

He didn’t even have any tags with him to begin with; they had to send for another set (he said he’d “lost them”). He didn’t always wear them even when he did get them. I got on his case about it a few times, told him he’d better hope he was recognizable when he kicked it out here, or that I was around to recognize him. He took that shit in stride. You got the impression that this dude did not have much of a care for the whole business of living or dying, which was par for the course in a survival sense sort of way because you couldn’t think about it too much or you’d go off your nut, but most of us had enjoyed our lives back in the World.

He spent the first month following me around and copying everything I did, and I let him because left to his own devices I figured he’d have died already. He was a quick learner and could usually fake his way through a question someone asked him, but I helped when I could. He did a double take anytime anyone gave him an order or assigned him a task, he couldn’t identify most of the equipment, you couldn’t abbreviate anything around him because he barely recognized the actual names of things let alone the slang versions. He kept quiet most of the time, which I figured was so it was less obvious that he was swimming in waters he’d never set eyes on before.

But it wasn’t less obvious to me. I started explaining things as I did them, casually, but enough that he could take what I was telling him and use it if he wanted. I wasn’t going to just come out and say “Hey, I don’t think you ever went to basic, and if you want my opinion, I’m pretty sure you’re not even in the army, so do you want to tell me why you’re here?” For one thing, I knew by then that I wouldn’t get a straight answer, and for another, he was here _now_ , so what were we going to do about it? Try going up to an officer and saying ‘I think somebody made a mistake. Can you send me home?’ Give _that_ a shot. But I could try to keep him alive. And as the weeks went on, he got better at managing things on his own convincingly. Two months in, and he was even talking like us. He kept up on patrols. He didn’t do a full-face wince every time he sighted in his gun. Even if he had the grace to look ashamed, he laughed at the same tasteless war jokes the rest of us did. He’d stopped jumping at the noise of shells and would just look up ironically like the rest of us and groan about missing sleep as we moved out. Oddly enough, that did something to what I thought about him. I didn’t like him any less, and I wasn’t less curious about his whole situation, but as I started to worry less something else came with it. I hadn’t watched _us_ turn into what we were out here. I’d barely even noticed we were changing. But I’d watched him. I’d even helped. Now I wondered if any one of us could turn back when it was over.

**+++**

Eventually he found a weird sort of place in the squad. Charles had started calling him Twiggy a while back based on the fact that he was so skinny, and he’d taken that in stride and kind of kept on striding. He might have figured out how to function, but once he’d come out of his shell he turned out to be a pretty strange dude. He struck some of the guys as being sort of a hippie type, which wasn’t that uncommon here but which rubbed some people the wrong way. He mocked everything, talked a _lot_ (but completely vaguely) about the various illegal stuff he’d done back in the World, and he had this way of saying things so that you weren’t sure if he was building up an elaborate joke or actually being serious. The group was split on how well they liked him. Some of them thought he was funny, and he’d become a sort of mascot, this weird lanky fella who could always find a way to make you laugh even if it was just by acting like more of a fool than you. Other guys thought he was too much of a pansy and they’d all stand up in a group and go outside for a smoke, even though we all smoked inside constantly, whenever he got to clowning around.

There was a third, smaller group that he hung around with too, because of the one thing they had in common: most of them, like him, had been drinkers even before the war. I hadn’t, and I didn’t know what they talked about when they got together but they all seemed to agree that it was important for them to commiserate. Liquor was hard to come by out here, more than you’d think - and any drug depended entirely on where you were and who you knew. The way he described it was that most of them were uncomfortably sober most of the time, and whenever they got a chance to get their hands on something, they were uncomfortably high. There was one dude called Bobby who made what for lack of a better word you _could_ call moonshine, and the guys in our company had made a collective agreement that they weren’t going to be trading rations for his stuff anymore, but it got broken all the time.

And then there was me. I had lost it good. Everything he did was great and funny and endearing, whether he was showing me the tiny scar on his knee from when he’d fallen into a dumpster or mumble-singing to some song I’d never heard while he struggled to assemble a cot in twice the time it took me to do it. He’d run his hand through his hair and I’d have a minute-long heart attack about the way it stood up in half-curls and fell back over his eyebrows. He’d trip walking up a hill and I’d reach out on instinct and then panic while I worried that he’d read into me touching him. Of course, some guys thought that he was that way, but in my experience, which I’ll tell you was more than theirs for certain, you could never be too sure. Some guys would seem to be on the queer side but if you approached them in any way that let on that you were or you thought they were, it would turn out that they weren’t and they’d make your life a living hell. I didn’t think he was the type to do that, but you never knew. I only had acquaintances in the company, not buddies really, except for him. And that was because you could just never be too careful.

Either way, I was sure he didn’t know too much about me either, at least in that direction. Which was good, because it didn’t matter how bad I had it for him, I wanted to be careful. Sometimes it was like he came from a world where being careful didn’t mean the same thing it did here, and I don’t know. It was irritating, in a way. Most of the guys here had years of experience on me, and I had figured out that that included him. So I filed his body and the things I associated with it into my list of things I could think about but not act on, at least when I didn’t have a tent to myself for more than five minutes.

And I latched onto the little things. Like this one night I remember, about three months after he showed up. We had ourselves a little party; it was quiet for once and we’d managed to get a good radio station to come in. We were all sitting around digging through our rations trying to figure out how we could put together something that might resemble a cake, and just generally smoking and fooling around. The Animals came on, one of their older songs, the one about getting out of someplace, _if it’s the last thing we ever do_. That one always felt sort of personally relevant out here. He started bopping around to the music (you should’ve seen him dance, it was ridiculous), made a whole production out of it once he realized people were watching him. Spun around pointing at a different dude every time the refrain came back on. Someone chucked a rolled-up hunk of bread at him and he dived, caught it in his mouth in mid-air.

 _There is a better life for me and you_. Maybe it was my imagination, but I couldn’t help thinking the last spin was just for me.

**+++**

There were nights he got up screaming, and it had nothing to do with the war. The first couple times it happened and I asked him if things were all right he shrugged it off and said yeah, they were, cool it. It was four months before I finally got him to tell me what it was about.

It had been a bad night, even I could tell that, but it had also been a bad day. We’d gone through a village that had already been hit pretty hard but wasn’t occupied right now, and as we moved through everyone in town who was left backed away. Little kids sprinted off around corners and out of sight. Old ladies turned around startled in their doorways and started crying without moving. Nobody was glad to see us, and we moved on pretty quickly. I felt watched on the way out, and I know we were. Nobody would have moved or breathed easy until we were gone for good. It wasn’t until later that we realized the last troops who’d been through weren’t VC. They were _us_. A whole bunch of men in town had been shot real early before dawn yesterday morning. What _we_ were told, later, was that they were the enemy, using the town as a cover, that sometimes you wound up having to open fire whether you thought there were innocents nearby or not and it just had to be like that, and anyway you never knew who was truly innocent. The whole village could be in on it. But if you had half a brain you knew that was just what they said to justify certain things. And _they_ meant _us_.

I had seen another town like that once, before I met him. I’d never talked to him about it, because what we’d done was not something you wanted to believe that you had done. We’d swept right through like...anyway, I don’t have a metaphor for it or a fancy way to say it. It wasn’t like killing people you couldn’t see half a mile away or shooting blind into the dark on some humid night. It wasn’t battle. It was a bunch of regular guys in a shed, none of them in uniform. There was an attempt at questioning, but it wasn’t really questioning. And it wasn’t much of an attempt, just a way to find an excuse to start shooting. Afterward they and by they I mean _us_ had dropped a bunch of orange on what was left.

This was back when if you asked for the public opinion over in the World we were still supposedly doing a good thing over here. That didn’t change for them for another year or so, until they started realizing we were dying too. By that point. Well. Those of us who were religious had already started rehearsing what we were gonna say when we got down below.

A lot of the guys I’d been to that town with were still here in the company. We never, ever had the conversation. And if it happened again that we were sent out on a day like that, I knew that even if every single one of us _wanted_ to say we hadn’t seen any sign of activity and shoot into the dirt or into the air and wait a bit just in case anyone wanted to heed the warning...we likely wouldn’t. At least I didn’t think so. Maybe that meant I didn’t have enough faith in our basic humanity or whatever, but I think I was just a realist. We wouldn’t disobey, not even indirectly. Not when it came down to it. Maybe one or two guys might, and face the consequences, but the rest would go through the motions and maybe afterwards do some praying or maybe not.

So that was what was on my mind that night. When he was asleep, he looked about ten times smaller than he did when he was awake and waving his long arms all over the place as he talked. He would curl up under the blanket into almost a fetal position, and it was silly to be gratified about it but the fact was that he was almost always facing me. I was half-staring into the distance, half looking at him, when it happened. At first I thought it was a nightmare; him with his eyes still shut tight, practically hyperventilating. I sat up, not sure what to do. Finally, I walked the two feet from my cot to his and sat down near where his feet would be if he didn’t sleep like a pretzel. “ _Twigs_.” Nothing.

“Hey. Twigs. Klaus.” I reached out, carefully, and put a hand on his shoulder, and he sat upright, almost comically.

“Shit.”

“You good?”

He shrugged, yanked the blanket out from under me, and pulled it over his shoulders. “It’s not...” he waved his hand vaguely, indicating the tent and everything around it. “Not this.”

“I knew that,” I said, although at that point I was only guessing.

After a minute, while I got some water, he told me. He’d grown up, he said, with a strict father, and the old man had put him and his siblings through the ringer. Then he gave me what I would later learn was the short, and incomplete version: when he was about eight, his father had shut him in a mausoleum, among other things, to toughen him up and make him face his fears. It hadn’t worked, and now to this day, he said, he saw spirits everywhere he turned. I took that at face value, although it wasn’t until a lot later that I realized it wasn’t a metaphor. “So...living out here...lots of bodies. You know,” he said, although I didn’t.

But if there was one thing I thought I had a pretty good handle on, it was that you did not have to understand. “What do I do?”

He managed a laugh. “Well, I’d say you could get me a drink, but Moonshine Bob’s out of business again.” He did the air quotes. “Apparently he’s ‘too busy.’ ”

“ _Really?_ ” The guy who made toilet wine was too busy to cook up his stuff in the middle of a war zone, huh?

“Yeah, can you believe?”

“So what else?”

He shrugged, clasped and unclasped his hands. There were tattoos on both palms: the right one said “hello” and the left one said “goodbye,” so when he held them up in front of him you could read it in the right order. I’d always wondered if he felt the need to switch hands when he was waving at people, depending on whether he was arriving or leaving. “Um...honestly I usually just get high, I...” He sighed. “I guess, loud music. Might be a good distraction. Just...talk a lot. Give me something else to think about. Some way for me to not get trapped in my head.”

So I talked. A lot that night, but also a lot in the weeks and months to come. I’d been a shy kid growing up, I was never so chatty as when I was with him. I told him about my grandmother and growing up with her and my mother and the twins on her property. I didn’t tell him about the fairy stuff. It halfway seemed like if I did, he might run right off into the night, found out at last, taking with him a lantern to guide travellers the wrong way on the road to land of the Ever-young. Instead I told him about calving season, and the pair of llamas my grandma had once bought at the county fair and what a total hassle they’d been to keep. About the huge way the sky looked over the back fields in summer, after the sun was down but before the stars were out. The shakes they served at the Dairy Aisle in town, so thick you felt like you were drinking a cheesecake.

In return I heard about his life, and while I did get the feeling that he was leaving things out, you could tell from the way he talked about it that what he _was_ mentioning was the important stuff. He had six siblings all together, but the one he was closest to had died a couple years ago, young and sudden. For a while I couldn’t figure out who was the oldest and who was the youngest, until it turned out they were all born the same year, adopted. He dug the only family picture he had with him out of his billfold and I saw all of them when they were kids, crowding around a table in a diner. “About the only picture we’ve got where we’re not in uniform. We made the waitress take it.”

He told me about their mom, who sounded almost fake, she was so perfect - baking cookies, wearing little flowery aprons, hair always in big victory curls. He laughed when I said as much. He told me about the times when they were closer as a family, before their brother died and they grew up.  About sneaking up to the roof of their house in the city and using the washlines for volleyball games. His fifth brother was the fastest, and they used to let him switch teams because there was an odd number of them anyway and he gave his side an unfair advantage. “We were real bad at it. But it was something we were allowed to be bad at, so we kind of enjoyed it.” 

I told him what I wanted to do when I got back to the World, how I’d been wanting to buy my own land and get some Holsteins, see if I could take a crack at a dairy farm. I’d done enough research and worked enough jobs at farms to know what I’d need to do, and it didn’t seem out of the question at all. It would be a nice quiet life, too, which I would need if we ever got out of this. I asked him what he thought of that, and it was the first time I realized that I was starting to picture him involved in all of my plans: probably not farming with me, but sitting on the stoop drinking sweet tea or lying out on the grass next to the garden, an old ball cap shielding his eyes from the sun. In real life, of course, I knew I wasn’t ever going to get to build a farm with him. But this was the indulgent life you got to create on the inside, to make up for what you weren’t going to get from the world. I could let myself picture picnic lunches with him, down in the crick behind the field, our trousers pushed up and our feet in the clear water.

He said it sounded nice, that he could see the appeal in a life like that.

**+++**

It happened about six months into knowing him. Six months of me wondering if he knew or guessed what I thought about him, of sneaking glances out of the corner of my eye, of trying to see if I was right about him based on everything from how he talked and walked to what music he liked to the way he got out of bed in the morning. We went to a bar - the only night we did that sort of thing in course of the entire tour, actually. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, going dancing at a relatively mod club in a relatively mod section of a city in the country we’d been bombing. But anything can become normal, especially if you haven’t looked normal in the eyes for a while.

None of us even had real civvies, so we had to go out and buy what we could scrounge. He had come up with this ugly-as-all-sin outfit - pants striped one way, shirt striped the other - and the shirt was so small on him that a two-inch strip of his belly was showing. He tried to say he’d planned it that way but I knew him well enough by then to know that if he’d planned it that way it would’ve been showing at least an inch more skin in either direction. The shirt just didn’t fit, which he was surprised about because he was still stringy, but he’d gotten just a tiny bit more muscle on him since I’d met him. He figured it was because he was relatively cleaner, and therefore eating relatively more often. I figured he was probably the first dude in the history of the army to _gain_ weight in country.

And I have to tell you, it was a good night even before stuff started to happen. For the first time since I’d gotten in, I had a real drink, not just half a can of the lukewarm beer we sometimes got in shipments, if we were lucky. Guys went crazy, putting all kinds of stuff together that didn’t belong in the same glass, just cause they could; daring each other to come up with the worst thing possible and then taste it. I’m a whiskey guy, I just drink the stuff straight. For a while I just stood by the bar and watched him move out among the dancers, waving his long arms around like some kind of marionette. I didn’t know where he’d learned to dance, but people were starting to give him a wide berth, in case he hit somebody. He’d look up occasionally long enough to wave for me to come out dancing, but I didn’t join him until the Doors came on. I wasn’t any better than he was, but there was _something_ happening that day, I don’t know. There we were in the middle of the room, where anyone could’ve seen us, but what with the noise and everybody else being preoccupied and his dumb drunk giggling, I managed to relax for five seconds and once, just once, he took my hand and spun me around to the kind of rock music you weren’t really supposed to do spins to, and I tripped on the way back in and nearly knocked us both down.

Later, we found a little back room, with these strands beads over the doorway, which would at least give us some warning before someone came through. The sun had gone all the way down by then, but the light was still this warm golden glow, like I was looking at everything through the bottom of my whiskey glass, the light warm and hazy with cigarette smoke and our own dizzy brains. I don’t remember what we said, only that we both moved in toward each other at the same time, but he got to me first.

The first night was not that perfect, but are they ever, and especially given that we were both so slammed by the time we got around to finding an empty room in the top floor of the bar and blocking the door for a couple hours. We slept for most of it, but the parts we didn’t were still...pretty memorable. A lot of fumbling around, me not sure what he was aiming for and him not sure whether it was something I was doing because I was bored or because I wanted to, a lot of me reassuring him that I was into it and him reassuring me that I was doing fine. By dawn we’d found our way back to the group, separately just to be on the safe side, and we all bussed back out of town smelling like the floor of a bar and still half-asleep, maybe a quiet voice here or there recounting an adventure from the night before, who’d made out, who’d spent it alone but happy, who was planning to go back.

We never did - go back to that bar in that town, that is, because within a week we’d moved on to pastures that were greener, but not for long.

**+++**

The next couple weeks were like something out of a corny daydream I could’ve made up to pass the time. Which I have some nerve saying, because overall we were still in the middle of a war, shooting people daily and being shot at on a regular basis. The food was still bad and mostly came in cans (even the bread), the sleep was still a lot less than you wanted it to be and in a lot worse conditions, the bugs were still everywhere and the mud never went away and your feet were never dry or clean, and the noise _never fucking stopped_ , not at dawn or the middle of the night or what had once been, way back there a million years ago in the World, the lazy part of the afternoon.

But he and I had something that as far as we knew none of these other suckers had right now, and I have to tell you that it made us feel pretty smug. We didn’t put words on it to begin with, and that was his idea, and not mine. I think he was probably convinced that if we weren’t out here in the middle of nowhere, I wouldn’t be doing this, and I didn’t immediately correct him because what if he was right? I didn’t _think_ he was, but I also didn’t want to spook him by telling him how serious I was getting, especially if he wasn’t. But I’d picture what it’d be like to say “boyfriend”  like some kind of sixteen-year-old girl talking about the guy who was taking her to the spring formal dance, and I’d start grinning to myself like an idiot.

It was a lot of sneaking around, which I’d expected, but it was tougher than you’d think given the general amount of chaos there was on any given day. Slipping away alone was something we did only when we thought we could be sure to have at least an hour’s worth of time. We learned to take advantage of the edges of the day: before and after dinner, being the last or the first people on a patrol, digging into narrow places where you couldn’t fit more than two guys at once. We’d volunteer for tasks if we were the only ones doing them, usually thankless jobs that other guys were trying to duck out of, but we’d fill the time talking and work quick so that we could come back on time and still have space to ourselves. It was more dangerous that way, being more or less alone, but it was quieter.

And we found other ways to be together. Shared habits. Shared food. Me catching his eye from across a tent and holding it or him whistling a tune we’d last heard the last time we’d slept together. We had one of those over-the-top handshakes that guys do with each other which was really just an intricate ritual that allowed us to hold hands for longer than we’d otherwise be able to (although for the record, Klaus said he thought that was also the reason other guys had them). One day we all went and got tattoos, and he and I coordinated ours in a real subtle way (okay, fine, we both said ‘hey, I wanna get a skull’ and then we got the guy to put different slogans on top).

When we had a quiet minute to ourselves, or at least a quiet minute, I’d read. I only had one book with me, a beat-up collection of poetry that my sister had sent me from home. I’d open it up at random and read out loud, but not too loudly. He admitted it had been years since he’d done much reading, and he’d never gotten poetry. If you do read lots of poetry, you hear that from everyone, so it didn’t phase me much. People think you’re supposed to do lots of thinking about it and get all the themes and stuff, but really it’s just as good if all you do is like the sound. He said he liked the sound when I was the one reading.

We made it through my book’s selection of Rumi and Walt Whitman’s Civil War poems - he decided _he’d_ read those ones, he liked ‘Prairie Boy’ a lot, and then I noticed that he had started using it as a thing to repeat when he was stressed, like I’d shown him months ago. We read Millay and then Wilfred Owen (a classic), and when I ran out of what was in the book, I tried to see if I had any memorized. Told him some of my grandma’s tales, not the ones he reminded me of because that still felt...I don’t know. It was stupid, but it felt like a jinx. Instead I did the epics, Cuchulainn and stuff like that. Cattle Raid of Cooley. Shouted the old stories sometimes, between the rattle of chopper blades and the rattle of incoming fire. Told him about the death of Ferdia in the middle of a battle of our own. To return the favor, he decided to tell me the entire plot of the only book he could from memory: it was _Dune_ , which I’d only vaguely heard of. He was not a very good storyteller, and I only half-paid attention, mostly just watching the looks that crossed his face while he tried to figure out what the plot had been. It turned out to be a dense space opera thing that he admitted he only really liked because his brother, the one who’d died, had been into it.

“You’d like him,” he said. “I mean, cause you know, you’re both readers. He’s kinda serious until you get to know him, but I think you’d like his humor.”

When he talked about his brother, he almost always had to add in the fact that he was gone, like if he didn’t mention it, he’d forget. He talked about him like he was never far away.

**+++**

To my surprise, it was Klaus who started it: the conversation, about what this was, what we were. It was a rainy day, around Easter, activity lower than usual. We had pushed our cots close enough to touch hands easy if we both reached out, and we were lying back, passing a cigarette between us and talking. There were only a few other guys around, one dude cleaning his gun with the radio on low, another guy with his jacket completely covering his head, trying to sleep. He was real casual about it, too, like he was totally comfortable. “So,” he said quietly. “Going steady, huh?”

It caught me off guard, and all I coughed and handed the light back his way. “Huh?”

“We are. And...I _like_ it,” he added. “I mean, I like it more than...” He paused. “Listen. I’ve never been with someone this long. Ever.”

That surprised me. “Honestly, I never would’ve guessed. I always thought you had a lot of experience.”

He blew out a cloud of smoke. “In the short-term, maybe. _Maybe_. You want to know the longest I’ve ever gone out with one person?”

“Yeah?”

“Three weeks. And that’s if you count the last Saturday when I was moving my stuff out.”

I said, “I don’t think you can count that, Twigs.”

“Yeah. But the point is. I like this, _but_ I’m...okay, I’m worried I’ll mess it up. I mean, what do we do when your tour’s up? Where are you gonna go?”

“Where are _you_ gonna go?” It occured to me that we’d never discussed what came next before. I guess I’d assumed he’d go back to the city.

He stretched his arms up over his head and turned to look at me. “I’ll figure something out, either way,” he said, over-casually. “I got my box.”

“Right.” The mystery box. It was easy to forget about the box, since he kept it under his cot and never mentioned it, never even touched it unless we were breaking up camp and getting ready to move out. But at the same time, that was what made it obvious. Guys had theories about what he had in there: money, mostly. Ted had this idea that he was actually an international jewel thief who had unfortunately not managed to dodge the draft, so he’d taken all of his ill-gotten gains with him to make sure he knew where they were. Nobody tried to open it, though. There was this...aura. _If you open this box_ , it said, _that skinny man will fuck you up_.

“Probably couldn’t go back and do it in the World,” I said. “ _This_ , I mean.” I’d thought about it, and as much as it appealed to me, I just didn’t see a way. We had an expiration date, and I’d just been trying not to think about it. “At least unless I moved to California, or something.”

“New York’s got some pretty open-minded neighborhoods.”

I couldn’t imagine living in New York. _New York?_ He must’ve seen the look on my face. He reached out as far as he could and ruffled my hair a little. It was longer right now than I’d ever had it, and I was starting to realize that I liked it that way, or at least, he sure did. “Yeah, it’s probably not for you,” he said. “You’re a nice midwestern boy.” That slow smile spread across his face. “You would take me to all the church potluck functions.”

I started laughing, mostly out of horror. “No!”

“Ice cream socials,” he murmured, and blew another cloud, doodled spirals in it with the tip of the cigarette. “Square dancing.”

“Shut up. I dunno how to square dance.”

“They didn’t teach you at your little all-American high school?”

“Fine, they taught us in sixth grade. But I forget,” I added.

“You wanna test that theory?”

His teasing voice worked real well on me, but I shook my head. It was too comfortable, here curled up with something to smoke and the rain drizzling outside, to think of getting up. That and, there were people around. “Maybe another time.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

For a few moments we lay in silence. Then he sat up, breaking through the swirls in the air. “Hey, I’ve just had a _crazy_ thought,” he said, and the way he said it made me sit up too. He had this voice he used sometimes, lazy but eager somehow, and I’d started to think of it as his Idea Voice. It was similar to, but not exactly like, his Mocking Voice, which was slightly manic to indicate his disdain, and his Sleep Voice, which was practically drunk, and his Drunk Voice, which was half-asleep.

He ran a hand through his hair until it stood up. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

“Yeah,” I said, still not sure where he was going.

“How would you feel about coming back with me? I could show you the ancestral home.”

“Your dad’s place?”

“He’s dead, remember? It’s just us kids now, and...who knows, maybe another face around would get everybody to play nice more often.”

“You want me to move back with you to stop your family from bickering?”

His face fell, and I realized he hadn’t realized it was a joke. “Don’t - no, Klaus, I _want_ to meet them. Really.”

“You just saying that?” He screwed up an eyebrow at me.

“You’ve already told me so much about them.”

“Oh yeah? Name my three brothers.”

“You’ve got four brothers,” I said, because by then I knew the order by heart. “Counting the one who passed, two sisters, your mother, and...” I still thought it was funny that they had one... “your _butler_.”

“Oh, you’re gonna love him.”

“You want me to come, for real?”

“You could stay. If you wanted. For good.”

And I would have said yes, right then, if not for the way he said it. There was a current, one that seemed to indicate that once you went, you’d never go back. I thought about the people who lived in the far hills, how if you went home with one for the night you might step back into your own world in a completely different time. Forty years would have passed, and still no older would be your lover under the hill, but the next time you went to their halls, you might not be let inside.

And there was the farm I’d been nursing in my imagination: the house was two stories, with yellow paint. White trim. The property was big, but there were lots of trees, with maybe a hammock in the front yard. Sunflowers by the hedgerow. The Holsteins dotting the pastures. In some of those old stories, you did not visit the fairy hill, but you brought one of them home with you. And you were happy, for a time, but something always tripped things up. They were inscrutable. Or they felt trapped. They weren’t meant for it; they wearied or just left. In my imaginary farmhouse: Klaus sprawled out on the floor of the front room, reading, his hair longer, in curls, the whole scene bathed in sun that glanced off of him as if he weren’t a man, but a mirror of one.

“I’ll think on that,” I said, and willed away the image. He wasn’t a sprite or a púca or a mirror. He was a thin human being, marked with the images of his past, struggling like all of the rest of us to do the right thing and survive it in the present. “It sounds wonderful. But I’ll have to think.”

“I’ll hold you to it,” he said. He took my hand, not to hold, but to clasp, like a handshake. Like a pact.

**+++**

If I had to make a guess, I’d say that things started to change right around about the time that Saint Nick bought it. It was a beautiful spring day - the skies were blue, the birds were actually singing. Birds I couldn’t identify, and the blue was frequently cut in half by a screaming jet going overhead, but it’s the thought that counts, or something. We called him Saint Nick because he was insanely polite, never drank or smoked or even swore; he was some kind of evangelical-type, I think, and he was real serious about it. Funnily enough, he didn’t do Santa Claus, that’s how religious he was. But he tolerated the nickname, maybe because Charles gave it to him and it made him a part of the group, right up until that nice warm afternoon when we were digging out some new positions and he found an old, buried mine that wasn’t quite dead. Sky-high. Wasn’t even bones.

It was different than most of the deaths we saw, not because people didn’t sometimes die right beside us, but it had been a quiet week, quiet enough for us to start some fortifications, and that day was supposed to be a rest day where we got some work done around the camp and worried about the blood another time. And besides that, it might have been our mine. We were working on top of what had already been some other US positions, a couple months back, and the thing is, sometimes people leave things behind. Sometimes those things will blow you up, because people are careless and it’s war and stuff escapes your notice. Nobody could be gotten in trouble for this one, and nobody could be fought back against. We were kind of stunned into silence for the rest of the day, and late that night, in our side-by-side cots, I was woken up by the sound of whispering.

It wasn’t what I’d come to expect from him, and by then I paid pretty good attention, just in case he needed something. I slept light anyway, we all did. But it wasn’t nightmare noises or frustrated near-crying. It sounded like he was having a hushed conversation.

“ _Hey_. Hey, hey, Nicky, _NickyNickyNicky_.” He was using the fast-talking voice he used when he wanted to make sure someone was paying attention to him. And hearing the name ‘Nicky’ spoken after what had happened that day was surreal enough without what happened next.

“Listen. Listen. I’m sorry. Gimme a minute. No, you didn’t...I want you to listen to me, man, you aren’t being punished for anything. Shit.”

I fought the urge to roll over. I couldn’t hear anyone else talking to him, just this steady stream of Klaus, with natural pauses like he was legitimately listening to someone. Maybe he talked in his sleep?

“Come on. Bullshit, dude. No, I’m not...listen, I don’t know what’s next. I don’t. That’s not part of this whole thing. Think of me...this is an in-between thing, right? I’ve got no control over that next bit. That’s not what I do.”

Then again, I’d slept next to him for most of the time I’d known him, and not once in all those months had I ever heard him talk in his sleep. I rolled over, trying to make it as small of a movement as possible, trying to look like I was doing it unconsciously.

But he wasn’t even facing me. He was half-propped up, gesturing with his hands, facing away from me, just a dim, long shape under the blanket in the darkness. As I watched, he ran a hand through his hair the way he did when he was frustrated with something, and pointed. “I don’t like it any more than you do, man. Believe me, if I had my rathers we would _not_ be having this little tete-a-tete. You’d be on your way to pick up your harp, or whatever, and I’d be having a good night’s sleep.” Pause. “Sorry. No.” He sounded frustrated now. “I don’t...know...if there’s harps.”

He sighed and lay back some. “I mean, you can stick around however long you want, I just don’t know if it’s gonna be that interesting for you. Yeah. No, I don’t...you just do...you know what? You just do what you feel in your _heart_ is right,” he said, waving a hand vaguely.

There was a long pause, while he looked at the tent wall. “Yeah. You take care of yourself or whatever. I’ll...uh...tell the boys you stopped by.” An even longer pause, and then he laughed a little to himself. When he spoke again, his voice was even quieter, tired-sounding. “No. I won’t. I won’t tell the boys he stopped by, because _this_ boy don’t want to look like a crazy person.”

He rolled over back toward me, and just in time I shut my eyes. For a moment I thought I’d gotten away with it.

“Dave?”

I didn’t move. Maybe he thought I was asleep, maybe not, but I felt instinctively like I’d intruded somehow.

“Dave, I...” I heard him push a huge breath out. “You know what. You’re asleep. Nevermind.”

I wasn’t, until long after I heard him start to snore a little. It seemed to take forever to get back to sleep. But in the morning, I wasn’t sure I’d seen anything at all.

**+++**

After that, I started to pay a little more attention. It wasn’t that there was any concrete evidence that there was Something Going On with him - that is, something _else_ \- but I’d seen him arrive. I’d listened to him talk. I’d been having sex with him for weeks now, so I had started to feel that I shouldn’t have to wonder what sort of things I didn’t know about him. I didn’t think he was a serious criminal, like Ted did. He wasn’t some kind of murderer or spy. But the fact that I couldn’t come up with a good explanation just frustrated me more. His evasiveness had been all right when I’d just been his friend, but now it had begun to feel like an obstacle.

So I started dropping questions. Stuff like ‘what _did_ your dad do for a living’ and ‘what’s your one brother’s name again? You know, the only one whose name I don’t know?’ and once I even asked him what year he was born and he’d paused for what had seemed like forever, like he had to do the math, and eventually gone, “19...40?” which would have made him twenty-eight and two years older than me if he was being honest.

 _If he was being honest_. He wasn’t a great liar, I was learning, but he _dodged_ questions really well, waffled around or handwaved them when he didn’t want to get into the subject. I asked him why he’d gotten his umbrella tattoo; he said he’d gotten it with his siblings. I asked what he thought about McCarthy, not because I necessarily needed his opinion, but because I wanted to see if he even had one, and sure enough, he blinked and said, “Well, _you_ know,” like that meant anything. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to catch him on. But I was building a case.

**+++**

Maybe eight and a half months in, we had the fight. It had been a rough couple of days: not much sleep, constant patrolling, a few days earlier Charles had been shot in the chest and as far as we knew he’d been alive when the choppers had showed up, but nobody’d heard anything since and we weren’t likely to. Whether he was dead or not, he’d be leaving. We’d picked up the slack, and nobody new had arrived yet, and our last two supply drops had been shot down miles away, so we were running low on decent food and nobody had gotten any mail for a good month or so.

Things were fucked in general. I don’t know why I felt the need to poke the hornet’s nest. Maybe because it was the one thing that for sure would distract me from the war.

It wasn’t our first fight, but our arguments were usually about simple things. Regular things. Where was the can of Spam he’d literally just had out on his cot, had I eaten it? _I know you have your own Spam_, _David_. Would he _please_ stop using the face paint as eyeliner? _It’s wasting it, and besides, who’s gonna see you? Do you really want guys to see you like that out here?_ They weren’t serious, just normal bickering.

We should’ve been asleep. We had maybe a couple hours before we’d be tapped to go out on watch again, but instead we were lying there talking, and I asked him some personal question again. I don’t even remember what it was that time, just that he did his usual thing, evaded, and I was so tired and pissed off from the shit week we’d had that I couldn’t be patient and I just asked him if he thought I was stupid.

I think he thought I was joking. He waved a hand. “No, of course not.”

“So quit being weird. Answer things. It’s not hard,” I added, knowing I sounded petty but already knowing I wasn’t going to be able to stop.

He rolled onto his stomach and rested his chin on his arms. “I’m not making shit up for the fun of it, you know.”

“So you’re making shit up?”

“I just said-” he began, but I held up a hand.

“Why? Do you not trust me? Do you think -”

He sighed. “It’s just that my life is a bit weird, and I don’t  think you -”

“You want to dumb it down?”

“I’m not dumbing it down, you just don’t want to hear that -”

“ _How_ do you know? How do you know that, when I don’t know what you think I don’t want to know? Because from what you’ve told me,” I said, “there’s no reason I shouldn’t want to know about your life. We’re...” I lowered my voice - “ _together_ , of course I want to know. You know about mine.” That was true.

He shrugged. “You’re not gonna believe me.”

“Yeah? Give me a shot.”

“No.”

That pissed me off. “You’re not even going to give me a chance?”

He shrugged.

“Because if that’s the case, I’m not sure I see the point of continuing this here, let alone trying to do it once we get back. Makes me think I’m just a placeholder for you.” I wasn’t sure, as I said it, whether I meant that or not. I loved him, that I was sure of. And I was pretty sure - almost one hundred percent - that he felt the same way. But what did that have to do with anything, if I loved someone who wasn’t honest and didn’t want to be, didn’t trust me enough to be? I’d spent so much time not bringing up my guesses or my suspicions, thinking that eventually he really would do it himself and I would find out how he’d gotten here, why I’d had to teach him everything, where he was from at all. I dug in my heels. “Makes me think that _you’re_ the one who wouldn’t be doing this, if we were anywhere else.”

He looked at me, really made eye contact for the first time tonight. Weird, for him. Normally he wouldn’t stop staring at you, until you were a little uncomfortable. “Are you...breaking up with me?”

“I don’t _want_ to be,” I said. “I just want you to be honest.”

“And if I’m not...” He let the rest of the sentence sit there, for me to deal with.

“Klaus. This isn’t like an ultimatum or anything. I’m just telling you how I feel.” Then I said, “But if I was, what’s it to you?” I took out my ace. It was working off of one of my earliest theories, more fairytale than explanation, but here, in this time, in this place, it felt as real as anything else. “You can leave anytime you like.”

“What?” He looked up. “You know I’m just as stuck here as the rest of you.” But if there was one thing I’d learned about Klaus Hargreeves, it was that he was never good at trying to seem innocent. His guilty voice was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Come on. When you showed up...you, you _showed up_. I was right there. You didn’t walk in. you didn’t come in on a chopper. I told myself for a while that you must’ve, because what else could it have been, right, but I was right there, Klaus. You _appeared_. And I think your box has something to do with it,” I added, guessing wildly at this point but pressing forward because I had to. “You never leave it behind, you never open it up. Nobody ever touches it. Can it get you out of here?”

“How would that work, exactly?” he asked, but his attempt to mumble and be casual wasn’t doing much for him.

“I don’t know, you open it up and it sends you places? What, did you beam down here? I have seen _Star Trek_.” I wasn’t trying to be funny, but he laughed anyway, in a hysterical sort of way.

“Yeah, sure, okay,” he said. “Fine. Say that’s true!” His voice was rising, getting more panicky and manic. “ _I don’t know how it works!_ ”

I sat up. I hadn’t thought he’d admit anything, not really. “It is... _your_ box, isn’t it?” I asked. I guessed I should’ve wondered about that before.

“No! It’s not!” He was whisper-shouting now. “I stole it! And I’ve only used it once and that was on accident, I just opened it up and I was here, and sarge started screaming at me before I could explain anything and now I’m halfway through a full tour and I’ve killed people! There’s some teenage guerilla kid who stands by my bed at night and he won’t tell me his name no matter how much I ask because he knows it was one of us Yanks who go thim and _I don’t know that it wasn’t me!_ ”

I tried to think my way through that outburst, and I could only latch onto one thing. “So when you said about the spirits...”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“And Saint Nick,” I said, remembering that night.

“Huh?” He was craning his head around like he was checking to make sure that nobody had heard him get upset.

“The night after Nick died? You were talking to him.”

He turned back to me. “Yeah.”

It was a lot to think about, and I guess that I wasn’t any good at thinking and saying decent things at the same time, because the next words out of my mouth were, “That wasn't so hard.”

I regretted it the instant I’d said it, but it was too late. He let himself fall back onto his cot. “Will you get outta here?”

I swallowed. “I’m sorry. And no.”

“Fuck you.”

I sat there like an idiot and waited for him to say something else, but I couldn’t look back and face whatever glare he was giving me. The minutes stretched out. For all I knew he’d fallen asleep. As I was working on what to say to salvage the situation, two guys came into the tent, and one of them waved in my direction. I waved back, and turned to find Klaus with his hands behind his head, just sort of looking at the ceiling. “We got about an hour before our turn,” I said, reminding him on reflex. He nodded, barely. “You wanna, uh...go outside?”

I got up and walked to the door without waiting for a reply, but he followed me. We sat outside, on the other side of the canvas, facing into the dark, muggy brush. The frogs were louder out here, and probably any conversation we had would be muffled. He drew his feet up cross legged, and I leaned back up against the tent, the pole pressing into my spine from the other side. “Okay,” I said. “But why didn’t you try to use it again as soon as you had a moment alone? Why stay here?”

For a while all I got was night noises, a loud laugh from far away across camp, the drip of the mist from the leaves. Finally he spoke. “At first? I was scared. Didn’t want it to put me somewhere just as bad.”

I nodded. I could get that. But there was something more, I knew.

“But then I just...you know what, it’s stupid.”

“No, go ahead.”

“I didn’t...no. Nevermind.”

“Okay then, why didn’t you try to use it? Was all that stuff about me coming with you someday just...what was it, just you fucking around?”

“No.” He reached out without looking at me and stopped just short of putting a hand on my knee, let it rest on the ground instead.

“But you don’t know if you could actually bring me. So why say I should go? To make me feel better? To make me feel like you actually liked me that much? To lead me on?”

It was probably a low blow, because I didn’t really think that those were any of the reasons. And he was dejected-looking enough by now. _Come on, asshole_. I shook my head. “Sorry. That’s not...I know that’s not it.”

I reached for his hand and gently put it in my lap, and held on. “I don’t think that. I just. I want to hear you say it.”

His hand twisted in mine. “I’m still here because of you,” he said quietly. “I’m here because I don’t want to leave you and I don’t want you to leave me and I never thought I’d fall in love, that’s never really happened for me before, and, and I don’t know if I can take you with me and if you want the truth that’s terrifying. And you’d never see your home again if you did. And if I stayed here with _you_...listen, it’s rough, something’s going on back there at home and I left it and I don’t know how much worse it’s gotten since I did - if I stay with you what’s my family going to do? I mean, I don’t do much for them, but I have to...I _have_ to be there. I’ve already been away for so long and I don’t even know if they know what...” He took a huge breath, more of a gulp, and I realized he was crying. I got my arm around his shoulders, and let him lean into me and shake. It was a while before he got himself together enough to talk. “You still want to hear about it all?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Of course.” He’d let his head rest on my shoulder, and his hair was tickling my face. I dropped a kiss into it. “We got time.”

He told me everything. The way he was raised, the reason he and his siblings were taken in to begin with. The powers they all had, and their father’s constant pressure to improve them. His one, lone, powerless sister, adopted by mistake, who he’d never learned to connect with. How they’d all left one by one as soon as they’d come of age, and only his biggest brother was left at home and had anything good to say about the old man. How they’d gotten back together for the funeral. How just before he’d met me, a couple in masks had burst into their family home for reasons he still didn’t know, and hauled him away to a hotel room to whale on him for a few days and interrogate him about his siblings, and when he’d finally escaped he’d brought the box with him hoping it would be valuable, and then he’d opened it and landed more or less in my lap, and the rest had been history.

The weirdest part was, I believed all of it. The moon. The ghosts. The time-travelling brother who was their younger brother but also their older brother too somehow. Not because it wasn’t _crazy_. It was. But like I said, he wasn’t much of a storyteller. If he’d been able to come up with a better lie, I think he might have, but I also think he was too tired to keep turning away. That, and the fact was that, wild as the whole story was, it did actually fill in the gaps pretty well.

He didn’t look right at me until he was done with all of it. “So uh...that’s the story behind my first tattoo,” he said, voice still wobbling a little bit. He gave me a nervous grin. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

“Gonna have to make a decision,” I said. And then, because I knew he was tired, and maybe because I knew this was as far as he was going to get tonight, I said, “I will. When are you from?”

“What?” He pulled away a little bit.

I felt myself smile a little. It was the one thing he hadn’t touched on while he’d been telling me the story, but it seemed obvious on this side of it. “Klaus. The way you talk? The stuff you do and don’t know? You weren’t born in 1940, come on. The way you act? _Especially_ the way you act? It’s the future, right?”

He nodded.

“When is it? Is it far away?”

“About fifty years,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Almost exactly fifty years.”

“And is it better there? Do you have to be careful? Would _I_ have to be careful?”

He looked up. I guess he wasn’t expecting that to be my big question, but it’s hard to picture the future, you know? It’s hard to think of the real stuff, like whether they’d have _Star Trek_ -y communicators or what music they’d be making or the sort of things people would wear. But there was one thing I did think about - couldn’t help thinking about, thought about in low moments, when I hadn’t been sure I cared about getting to the future, because _what if_?

“You mean could you be out? Yeah, probably. You should be okay where I live. Like, don’t get the wrong idea, it ain’t a perfect world, but I could take you out to dinner, sort of thing.”

I hadn’t put the hope into words, but thinking back, it had been there anyway. The way he was: way less cautious than me, like he came from an environment where the rules were different. If I could let my guard down even for once in my life without having to worry - if I could live in that world without having to wait until I was an old man -

“All right, then,” I said. “I’ll go with you.”

He shook his head a little, like something was funny. He back to staring down at our hands, still intertwined. _Hello_ covered my palm, and my fingertips rested on _goodbye_. “Just like that?”

“I’ll go your way,” I said again, and it was more than just a relief to say it. It felt good. Now that the decision was made, it was made. _Soul of my soul of the soul of a hundred universes_. There you go. Simple. “And whatever’s happening back there, whatever’s wrong, I’ll stand by you. I’ll help you and your family if you need that, and once it’s all over maybe we’ll still get that little place in the country.”

I expected him to be happy about that, especially since he so obviously didn’t want me to leave. But when he looked up he seemed about ready to start crying again. His voice was shaky, like it was when he was drunk and trying his damndest to get some sincerity across. “You’d leave behind everything you’ve ever known?”

In the distance, the frogs called. From inside the tent, somebody’s boots started getting louder, and a voice, sounding surprisingly close, said, “Twiggy! Davey!”

We both jumped, but there was no way he’d know we were both out here unless we gave it away somehow. Klaus pointed back around the tent with his thumb. “I’ll go first,” he hissed.

I nodded. As he scrambled to his feet, I reached back up. “I didn’t answer your question.”

“And? You’d leave it all behind?” He bounced on his heels, anxious to get moving. From far away, the background noise of the jungle gave way to the pop and scream of mortars. When I got back around to the front of the tent I’d be able to see the red streaks shooting away from the hills.

“Look around yourself. I already have.”

**+++**

We should have gone right then and there, as soon as we were alone again. I don’t know what held us back - fear, for him, definitely. Loyalty, maybe, in a real vague way. Not for the country, the country and the brass and everyone who had poured their time and money and power into sending a bunch of kids to duke it out with another bunch of kids in a strip of muddy farmland could go to hell. But what about the boys? I think we were worried about them. Couldn’t be right to leave them here in the middle of it, when we had a ticket to ride. So we stayed, just a few more weeks, coming up with reasons not to try the box. _It’s late, we should do it when we’re rested_. _Well, there might be a strike tonight, we should be here in case they need us_. What if we couldn’t control the direction, and it put us in the middle of another war? Or the black death? Or the caveman times? Had we thought about that? _What if it splits us up? What if it’s broken? What if it blows us sky-high?_

But even those worries were more of excuses. We’d talked about it the morning after he’d told me, hashed it all out when we got back from patrol. I figured that since he’d stolen it from two people, and he hadn’t seen a second box, it should be able to move both of us without trouble. Even if it didn’t get us back to his time on the first try, we’d be together, and we’d figure it out from there. “Anywhere’s gotta be safer than here,” I’d said. “And maybe it’s simple, maybe you just have to think about where you’re going.” It was as good a guess as any.

“So you think I just got here because I wasn’t paying attention?” He thought about that for a minute and then shrugged. “Yeah, that tracks. Then again, we don’t know if it’ll even do it again. Maybe it needs fueled up.”

“Never know unless we try.”

He’d given the box a dirty look, like it might crawl out from under the cot and bite him. “Mmph.”

“Well, we better do it soon,” I said, “Because you’re nine months out and I’m almost twelve and the closer we get to finishing these tours the closer we are to getting split up.”

But the tenth month was almost up when we put our foot down. “We'll do it tomorrow,”  he said one night, and we stashed what we thought we could into our packs, mostly food, our blankets, and then a little extra ammunition just in case we wound up somewhere dangerous. We stuck our packs under his cot with the box, so we could grab it first thing in the morning. Then we spent the night with the boys, had some dinner, lit up a few smokes for Ted (it was his birthday, but no candles and no cake, so we made do with the entertainment we had). Klaus and I had been planning on getting some early-shut eye.

And it fell apart just like that.

It came in quick, like it had the first night I’d seen him. One minute a regular night, quiet, the war in the distance, the next second the war very much right there. We didn’t think to stay behind, although maybe that would have been the smart option. We got our gear and went. He was efficient now, no fumbling around and looking like he’d dropped both his ass and his helmet. We fell in together, me on the left and him on the right, the way we always did. As we ducked down and loaded, he leaned close enough to my ear to talk over the screaming of the artillery.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

 _Tomorrow_. Just one word tonight, but one that would keep me going for as long as it had to. I gave him a thumbs-up, and would’ve managed a kiss if we hadn’t all been in such tight quarters by then. As an afterthought I reached out and gave his hand a squeeze. And the earth and the sky tore each other to pieces all around us.

**Author's Note:**

> I was originally going to end this fic with a scene about Dave's experiences *after* his death, possibly involving the Rude Little Girl On the Bike - but every time I tried to work it in, it felt tonally dissonant. If enough people are really interested in the outtakes, I might publish them sort of informally - just comment & let me know.


End file.
